Google announces first open source contest for high school students
Brisbane, Australia, 28 November 2007 – Who doesn't love a contest? We certainly do. Google believes strongly in
students having opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math, and today at the Open Source Developers'
Conference in Brisbane, Australia we're pleased to announce the Google Highly Open Participation Contest to help
introduce high school students to open source software development.
Students can now visit http://code.google.com/opensource to write code and documentation, prepare training materials, conduct user-experience research, and win prizes --
t-shirts, cash, or, for ten grand-prize winners, a chance to visit the Googleplex in Mountain View, California.
For the past three years University students have participated in Google Summer of Code (http://code.google.com/soc/) with great results: hundreds of University students have been introduced to open source software, thousands of people
across the globe have begun development together, and millions of lines of open code have been produced. As we thought
about what we could do to help encourage students before university and build a pipeline of future talent, we developed
Google Highly Open Participation Contest -- the first contest from our open source team exclusively for secondary school
and high school students.
Google will work with ten open source organizations -- Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin,
Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python Software Foundation, and SilverStripe CMS -- for this pilot effort, each of whom will
provide a list of tasks to be completed by the student participants. Tasks typically fall into the following categories:
code, documentation, research, outreach, quality assurance, training, translation, and user interface, so there should
be something for everyone, and parents and educators can help by sharing this opportunity with their children and
students.
The contest is open to students age 13 and older who have not yet begun university studies, and contestants will be able
to claim tasks until 7:00pm, Tuesday, 22 January 2008. We hope that students who participate will be long-term
contributors to these and other open source projects in the future, and we look forward to announcing the grand-prize
winners on February 11.
For more information, please visit http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/
ENDS